Lab-grown meat could feed hundreds of thousands of people, and reduce the need for herds of cows. CC-licensed photo by bnilsenbnilsen on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Chewy, no gristle. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Mark Zuckerberg looks to deliver hit to Elon Musk with upcoming Twitter clone • WSJ
Salvador Rodriguez:
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Meta Platforms plans to release a microblogging app called Threads, a new product that will hit the market soon after Twitter owner Elon Musk announced new strictures that will limit how many posts users see on that platform.
Social-media veterans and analysts see the planned app as a formidable competitor for Twitter, which has faced falling revenue and other challenges since Musk took over the company in October.
Meta, like other tech giants, has a record of copying features of competitors’ platforms and implementing them into its own services. The company is expected to build the microblogging app off its Instagram user data, a strategic maneuver that may help the app quickly gain users, people familiar with the matter said.
The competition between the two companies comes as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Musk publicly discussed the possibility of physically fighting each other.
Twitter didn’t comment.
Since Musk’s takeover of Twitter in October, many Twitter users have voiced that they want an alternative. Over the past nine months, the company has experienced numerous technical issues, removed thousands of employees, lost users and advertisers, and was criticized for how the service moderates content. Musk last week took steps to limit how many posts users can see on the platform, saying he wanted to combat “extreme levels of data scraping.”
Startups such as Mastodon, Truth Social and Bluesky have gained users but have yet to emerge as a true rival to Twitter.
“I do think a new microblogging leader will emerge to supplant Twitter, but it is far from a foregone conclusion that the winner will be Meta,” said Steve Teixeira, Mozilla chief product officer and a former Twitter and Meta executive. Mozilla has criticized how large tech companies manage social media and has said the industry is “broken.” A lack of user trust might hinder adoption for Meta’s new app, he said.
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I did see something suggesting this was on the Google Play Store but got pulled. You’d think Zuck would be getting this pushed out the door as fast as possible. Especially because it looks like it gets over the biggest problem with a new social network – how to find your followers from your previous social networks. With Instagram and Facebook as feeders, it has a big advantage.
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China to restrict exports of metals critical to chip production • Bloomberg
Archie Hunter and Alfred Cang:
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China imposed restrictions on exporting two metals that are crucial to parts of the semiconductor, telecommunications and electric-vehicle industries in an escalation of the country’s tit-for-tat trade war on technology with the US and Europe.
Gallium and germanium, along with their chemical compounds, will be subject to export controls meant to protect Chinese national security starting Aug. 1, China’s Ministry of Commerce said in a statement Monday. Exporters for the two metals will need to apply for licenses from the commerce ministry if they want to start or continue to ship them out of the country, and will be required to report details of the overseas buyers and their applications, it said.
China is battling for technological dominance in everything from quantum computing to artificial intelligence and chip manufacturing. The US has taken increasingly aggressive measures to keep China from gaining the upper-hand and has called upon allies in Europe and Asia to do the same, with some success. The export limits are also coming at a time when nations around the world are working to rid their supply chains of dependencies on overseas equipment.
Impact on the tech industry “depends on the stockpile of equipment on hand,” said Roger Entner, an analyst with Recon Analytics LLC. “It’s more of a muscle flexing for the next year or so. If it drags on, prices will go up.”
China is the dominant global producer of both metals that have applications for electric vehicle makers, the defense industry and displays. Gallium and germanium play a role in producing a number of compound semiconductors, which combine multiple elements to improve transmission speed and efficiency. China accounts for about 94% of the world’s gallium production, according to the UK Critical Minerals Intelligence Centre.
Still, the metals aren’t particularly rare or difficult to find, though China’s kept them cheap and they can be relatively high-cost to extract.
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Just the first glimmerings of a serious trade war. The quid pro quo for loosening this will almost surely be access to ASML machines, used for chip lithography, and presently banned from export to China.
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US Army Criminal Investigation Division: security alert on unsolicited smartwatches sent in post • LinkedIn
US Army Criminal Investigation Division (which really is a thing):
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Attention❗There have been incidents of military personnel receiving D18 Smart watches in the mail. Concerns are the watch can be used as a tool to gain personal information from individuals & cause a significant Info/Operations security threat to the United States Department of Defense and its members.
Action❗If you receive an unsolicited D18 smart watch please contact your unit Security Manager or Counterintelligence.
Do not connect it to your personal Wi-Fi or bring it to work. It is recommended that you do not use the item for any purpose whatsoever.
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The D18 is dirt cheap (£30 or so) and compatible with Android and iOS. This is a legit warning, but what isn’t clear is who was sending the unsolicited watches, or how many, or to who.. pretty much everything. A fascinating little mystery.
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Lab-grown meat just reached a major milestone. Here’s what comes next • MIT Technology Review
Casey Crownhart:
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One major thing I’ll be watching is how these companies start producing their products at larger scales. Upside’s pilot facility can currently produce around 50,000 lb (22,600 kg) of finished products each year. At full capacity, it will eventually be able to grow to about 400,000 lb (180,000 kg) per year.
That sounds like a lot, but in the grand scheme of food production, it’s pretty tiny. Large commercial meat facilities produce millions of pounds of meat each year—and that’s the sort of scale Upside is targeting for its first commercial facility, said Eric Schulze, VP of global scientific and regulatory affairs at Upside foods, in an email.
Eat Just’s cultured meat subsidiary Good Meat runs two demonstration facilities, one in the US and one in Singapore. Those facilities use large reactors with capacities of 3,500 and 6,000 litres, respectively, said Andrew Noyes, VP of communications at Eat Just. Again, those sound like huge reactors, but the company’s plans for its first commercial operation include 10 250,000-litre reactors, and in total, capacity will be about 30m lb (13.6m kg) each year.
While scaling up processes that have already been demonstrated in labs and pilot facilities will be a major development in the industry moving forward, I’m also fascinated to see what new sorts of products come to market in the next few years. There are over 150 companies in the cultivated meat industry, making everything from beef to tuna to products unlike anything on the market today.
A few potential bottlenecks face companies trying to bring new products to market, including developing cell lines, designing and building bioreactors, and making the meat’s structure, said Jess Krieger, founder and CEO of the cultivated meat company Ohayo Valley, in a panel discussion.
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Per capita meat consumption in the US: about 99kg (call it 100kg) annually. It’s about the same in the UK, about 66kg in the EU28.
So the Good Meat reactor making 13.6m kg per year would supply 136,000 Americans or Britons; or ~200,0000 people in the EU28. The meat from a cow is about 40% of its live weight; typical cow weight is ~500kg, so 200kg of meat, or two people’s consumption; so this would save at most ~400,000 cows. (It’s more complicated because we eat a mix of meats, but this is a start.)
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Lessons from the catastrophic failure of the metaverse • The Nation
Kate Wagner:
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Last year, some staggering names such as Zaha Hadid Architects, Grimshaw, Farshid Moussavi, and, of course, the Bjarke Ingels Group pledged to create “virtual cities,” virtual “offices,” and equally vague sounding “social spaces” to be funded with cryptocurrency and supplied with art (NFTs). The eagerness to latch onto whatever the newest trend the increasingly desperate and failure-prone tech industry dished out was so palpable that even real-life developers like hotel chain CitizenM and brands like Jose Cuervo got involved and threw what one presumes is a whole lot of actual money at the enterprise. The rush to move into virtual real estate was a full-on frenzy.
In some respects, who could blame these companies and firms? Since the virtual reality service’s launch in 2021, the so-called “successor to the mobile internet” became the recipient of a kind of soaring hype few things are ever blessed with. According to Insider, McKinsey claimed that the Metaverse would bring businesses $5 trillion in value. Citi valued it at no less than $13 trillion.
There was only one problem: The whole thing was bullshit. Far from being worth trillions of dollars, the Metaverse turned out to be worth absolutely bupkus. It’s not even that the platform lagged behind expectations or was slow to become popular. There wasn’t anyone visiting the Metaverse at all.
The sheer scale of the hype inflation came to light in May. In the same article, Insider revealed that Decentraland, arguably the largest and most relevant Metaverse platform, had only 38 active daily users. The Guardian reported that the monetized content ecosystem in Meta’s flagship product Horizon Worlds produced no more than $470 in revenue globally. Thirty-eight active users. Four hundred and seventy dollars. You’re not reading those numbers wrong. To say that the Metaverse is dead is an understatement. It was never alive.
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What sort of bet would you give that a significant proportion of those 38 users are from Decentraland, the company. (Also, following the original trail in the article was fun. From The Nation to Insider to Coindesk, which originally reported it.
Anyway. Let us speak no more of the metaverse.
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Foundation of all known life: Webb Telescope makes first detection of crucial carbon molecule • SciTech Daily
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A team of international scientists has used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to detect a new carbon compound in space for the first time. Known as methyl cation (pronounced cat-eye-on) (CH3+), the molecule is important because it aids the formation of more complex carbon-based molecules. Methyl cation was detected in a young star system, with a protoplanetary disk, known as d203-506, which is located about 1,350 light-years away in the Orion Nebula.
Carbon compounds form the foundations of all known life, and as such are particularly interesting to scientists working to understand both how life developed on Earth, and how it could potentially develop elsewhere in our universe. The study of interstellar organic (carbon-containing) chemistry, which Webb is opening in new ways, is an area of keen fascination to many astronomers.
CH3+ is theorized to be particularly important because it reacts readily with a wide range of other molecules. As a result, it acts like a “train station” where a molecule can remain for a time before going in one of many different directions to react with other molecules. Due to this property, scientists suspect that CH3+ forms a cornerstone of interstellar organic chemistry.
The unique capabilities of Webb made it the ideal observatory to search for this crucial molecule. Webb’s exquisite spatial and spectral resolution, as well as its sensitivity, all contributed to the team’s success. In particular, Webb’s detection of a series of key emission lines from CH3+ cemented the discovery.
“This detection not only validates the incredible sensitivity of Webb but also confirms the postulated central importance of CH3+ in interstellar chemistry,” said Marie-Aline Martin-Drumel of the University of Paris-Saclay in France, a member of the science team.
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This could mean that there are other life forms out there, and crucially they might be able to lend us some money.
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Climate crisis linked to rising domestic violence in south Asia, study finds • The Guardian
Tess McClure and Amrit Dhillon:
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As deadly heatwaves sweep through cities in India, China, the US and Europe amid the climate crisis, new research has found that rising temperatures are associated with a substantial rise in domestic violence against women.
A study published in JAMA Psychiatry on Wednesday found a 1ºC increase in average annual temperature was connected to a rise of more than 6.3% in incidents of physical and sexual domestic violence across three south Asian countries.
The study tracked 194,871 girls and women aged 15-49 from India, Pakistan and Nepal between 2010 and 2018, and their reported experiences of emotional, physical and sexual violence. It compared that data with temperature fluctuations across the same period. India, which already had the highest reported rates of intimate partner violence of the three, also had the biggest increase in abuse: with a 1C rise in heat came an 8% rise in physical violence, and 7.3% rise in sexual violence.
Countries around the world are already in the grip of extreme temperatures and heatwaves. This month, India was reporting temperatures up to 45C (113F) and dozens of heat-related deaths, Mediterranean Europe emerged from a record-breaking April heatwave, Texas entered its third week of deadly heat with temperatures up to 46C, and China urged people in northern cities to stay indoors as temperatures of over 40C broke records.
Michelle Bell, a professor of environmental health at Yale University and a co-author of the study, said that there were “many potential pathways, both physiological and sociological, through which higher temperature could affect risk of violence”. Extreme heat can lead to crop failures, buckle infrastructure, eat into economies, trap people indoors and render them unable to work – all factors that can place families under extreme stress and push up violence rates.
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It’s the ice cream/murder thing: murders rise when ice cream sales rise. Not because ice cream makes people kill other people, but because heat drives people a bit mad.
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Why human societies still use arms, feet, and other body parts to measure things • AAAS
Michael Price:
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Although standardized units are often upheld as superior to informal corporeal measures, people in many societies have continued to use their bodies this way well after standardization has taken root, notes Roope Kaaronen, a cognitive scientist who studies cultural evolution at the University of Helsinki.
To explore how widespread such practices have been in human history, Kaaronen and colleagues pored over ethnographic data from 186 past and present cultures across the world, looking for descriptions of body-based units of measurement in a database called the Human Relations Area Files. This database is the product of an international nonprofit organization that has been collecting and administering ethnographies and anthropological literature since the 1950s.
The team found these systems used in every culture they looked at, particularly in the construction of clothes and technologies. For example, in the early 1900s, the Karelian people, a group indigenous to Northern Europe, traditionally designed skis to be a fathom plus six hand spans long. In the late 1800s the Yup’ik people from the Alaskan coast recorded building kayaks that were 2.5 fathoms long plus a cockpit, which was the length of an arm with a closed fist.
Next, the team looked at a subsample of 99 cultures that, according to a widely used benchmark in anthropology, developed relatively independently of one another. Fathoms, hand spans, and cubits were the most common body-based measurements, each popping up in about 40% of these cultures. Different societies likely developed and incorporated such units because they were especially convenient for tackling important everyday tasks, the authors argue, such as measuring clothes, designing tools and weapons, and building boats and structures. “Think of how you’d measure a rope or a fishing net or a long piece of cloth,” Kaaronen says. “If you measured it with a yardstick, it would be quite cumbersome. But measuring slack items with the fathom is very convenient: Just repeatedly extend your arms and let the rope pass through your hands. So it’s no coincidence that we find the fathom being used for measuring ropes, fishing nets, and cloth around the world.”
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Elon Musk really broke Twitter this time • The Atlantic
Charlie Warzel:
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this weekend’s disasters are different. The decision to limit people’s ability to consume content on the platform is the rapid unscheduled disassembly of the never-ending, real-time feed of information that makes Twitter Twitter.
His supporters are confused and, perhaps, starting to feel the cracks of cognitive dissonance. “Surely someone who can figure out how to build spaceships can figure out how to distinguish scrapers from legit users,” Graham—the same one who supported Musk in November—tweeted on Saturday. What reasonable answer could there be for an advertising company to drastically limit the time that potentially hundreds of millions of users can spend on its website? (Maybe this one: On Saturday, outside developers appeared to discover an unfixed bug in Twitter’s web app that was flooding the network’s own servers with self-requests, to the point that the platform couldn’t function—a problem likely compounded by Twitter’s skeleton crew of engineers. When I reached out for clarification, the company auto-responded with an email containing a poop emoji.)
All the money and trolling can’t hide what’s obvious to anyone who’s been paying attention to his Twitter tenure: Elon Musk is bad at this. His incompetence should unravel his image as a visionary, one whose ambitions extend as far as colonizing Mars. This reputation as a genius, more than his billions, is Musk’s real fortune; it masks the impetuousness he demonstrates so frequently on Twitter. But Musk has spent this currency recklessly. Who in their right mind would explore space with a man who can’t keep a website running?
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The rate limit also broke Tweetdeck, which loads tweets from multiple lists, and which is used by professional social media operators. Good job, Elon.
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The Password Game
I’m pretty sure my last corporate password system used these rules. (Don’t use your own password on this, but then again, if your password is anything like this..)
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 